


In These Stones

by cosmogyrals



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin, Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 04:19:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyrals/pseuds/cosmogyrals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto Jones somehow manages to become one with the city. The problem is, he has no idea what the hell to do next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In These Stones

**Author's Note:**

> A fusion with Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift/Magicals Anonymous books. Not the Whoniverse crossover I've been intending to write, but one that wouldn't leave me alone till I wrote it down anyway.

Ianto Jones is lost. Not from a physical point of view - he's never lost in Cardiff - but, rather, from a spiritual one. His entire life has fallen apart. It's hard to believe that just a month ago, he'd had a job, a girlfriend, something approaching _happiness_ -

And now it's all gone, and he's back in Cardiff, living in a grubby flat in Grangetown, trying to _escape_ from his flat whenever he can because he can't bear to be around what Lisa's become. He loves her, he wants to do whatever he can to save her, but he doesn't want to be alone with her if he can possibly avoid it.

So he walks. He wanders through the streets of Cardiff and tries to pretend he can be someone else - anyone else - and though he knows what he has to do, he's not sure how to go about doing it.

And then, one dreary day, whilst he's standing in the middle of Roald Dahl Plass, something undefinable changes. He can feel the ebb and flow of the tide in the harbour like his own heartbeat, the commuters moving through the city like blood travelling through his veins, and, like something imperceptible, the crack running through the heart of Cardiff, not a scar, but something deeper, that runs through its very bones - _his_ bones.

Ianto blinks once, twice, and then it's gone, and he's just Ianto again - though a thoroughly rattled Ianto. He's read all the Torchwood pamplets, he knows what to do in just about any situation, from dealing with mind-controlled coworkers to temporal displacement to zombies, but becoming one with the city was never mentioned in any of them. But Ianto has his own solution to problems, and once he stops trembling, he leaves the Plass to go have a cup of coffee.

Torchwood One's records had been decidedly lacking when it came to magic; not surprising, considering that the Institute had always eschewed anything it couldn't prove quantitatively. Ianto remembers a few records here and there mentioning sorcerers and druids and necromancers and the like and dismissing them out of hand almost immediately thereafter, even in conjunction with things they couldn't explain otherwise. Is what just happened to him magic, or is it alien? And is there really a difference between the two?

As he walks home, he slips into a new-old way of walking, a rhythm he could swear he's never used before, but one that just seems right, one that's in time with the pulse of the city. Everybody looks through him like he's not even there, and that's just the way Ianto likes it.

 

He falls asleep more easily that night than he has in longer than he can remember, and he dreams. Not the nightmares that keep him up night after night, the ones of the scent of heated metal and blood and metallic screams, but- a strange dream, like nothing he's ever had before.

"You're a Jedi," Ianto says to the brown-robed man in his dream, feeling a bit foolish. "Right?"

"I'm your spirit guide," he offers helpfully.

"Spirit...guide?"

"You're a shaman, Ianto!" The carefully cultivated English accent falls away in favour of an irascible Scottish burr for a moment, and Ianto sighs, wondering just how fictional characters can make daft pop culture references.

"Why- why couldn't it have been Alec Guinness? Or Sean Connery? I don't even _like_ Star Wars. James Bond is nice, I'll take James Bond." He's not sure why he's arguing with a pop-culture-quoting figment of his imagination anyway. "But, no, I've got Obi-Wan bloody Kenobi, and not even from the original trilogy." No, it's a bearded Ewan McGregor standing in front of him, and Ianto hasn't got the slightest idea what's going on, except that he feels strangely lucid, and he _knows_ that he's dreaming, something which doesn't often happen.

"That's just like you, isn't it? You're faced with something beyond your comprehension, with becoming one with the city, and you argue the details of it all. You haven't even got a tribe, have you?"

"A tribe?" Ianto feels like he's got a jigsaw puzzle that's missing half the pieces - more than half, actually. He is, he decides, in way over his head now. "Can I wake up now?"

Obi-Wan folds his arms over his chest, giving him a stern look, and Ianto wonders if this is how Anakin developed an inferiority complex that led him to the Dark Side. "You," he says, in a most un-Jedi-like voice, "are a crap shaman."

And with that, Ianto awakes, the dim light of three in the morning shining in through his curtains, and there's nothing left to do but throw on a pair of jeans and go walking again, away from the low mechanical whine that cuts through everything in the flat. The cobblestones whisper to him of things that don't belong in Cardiff, of a man who doesn't die, of aliens lurking below the streets, of a darkness buried deep under the city, pinned by the not-a-scar running through it. 

"What am I supposed to do?" Ianto demands finally, stopping to lean against a lamppost, but there's no answer. For a moment, he fancies he can see a lithe form moving in it, the metal rippling like water, miniature eyes glowing the same colour as the light, but when he blinks, it's gone again, and he shakes his head. This must be what going mad is like.

 

Two nights later, he hasn't figured anything else out, and Obi-Wan Kenobi hasn't reappeared in his dreams. Ianto's tried googling shamans (and came up with loads of video game-related stuff), checked on Facebook to see if there are any tribes in Cardiff looking for a shaman (though he doesn't have the slightest idea what he would do if he found one), and is finally back to walking through the city again, as if that will lead him to answers. It seems to be the only thing in his life that makes sense anymore, the only thing that feels right. 

And then he stumbles across a Weevil. He recognises it from Torchwood's briefing materials; they'd had a small colony of them in London, briefly, before Yvonne Hartman had had them all rounded up and exterminated. There's a man in a long military coat fighting it, and Ianto wonders if he's just stumbled across Torchwood Cardiff. He _hopes_ he has, because he's been meaning to, although the shaman thing's distracted him for a bit (but anyone would be distracted if they managed to become one with the city, he reckons). He picks up a stick and lends a hand and, as it turns out, he _has_ lucked out, because he's certainly familiar with the name Jack Harkness.

Jack refuses to hire him, though, even after Ianto makes him a coffee, and it's only through more sheer dumb luck that Ianto manages to find the pterodactyl later on. Well, okay, it's less sheer dumb luck and more shamanic _instinct_ , that feeling of something out of place in the city, but whatever it is, the important bit is that he can use this to gain access to Torchwood, and then- then he can help Lisa get back to normal.

(In the process, he also manages to discover that he can walk through walls, something that is thoroughly discomforting and entirely too _magical_ for his liking. Between this and becoming effectively invisible, he could sneak into Torchwood that way, but he knows that's not the way to do it. Besides, he doesn't know if he could take Lisa with him like this, and that's the most important part.)

The pterodactyl clinches it; Jack agrees to hire him after they've managed to subdue it, and Ianto hates himself a little for the subterfuge he's already working on the man. He feels even worse the next morning, when he meets his new coworkers and something just _clicks_ inside him. He's not sure what it is, but he knows it's something he doesn't want. He doesn't want to get close to these people, not when he's got to help Lisa. But, like everything else that's happened to him over the course of the last week, he's not sure he's got a choice in the matter, and he thinks about what Obi-Wan said about a tribe. Surely they can't be a _tribe_ of any sort, he thinks, not a proper one, but deep in his heart, he knows he's wrong.


End file.
